Load Interrupt Driven Screen Saver for Real Iron?

[Tursi]

I've finished the first draft of the viewer tool, and it all appears to be working, so I've counted it as a release.

 

http://harmlesslion.com/software/vdpcap

 

Because there are a lot of moving parts, it looks more complex than it is, so I did a video where I introduce the viewer and show how to work it. I run all four of the captures you provided, Ohm, and then I do a harder one to show how to search. (Looks like it's going to take about an hour from this point to upload.)

 

http://youtu.be/HI3MFQgeN4g

 

The F18A stuff would be nice, and technically all the information is in there... but at a certain point I wonder that an external capture system isn't going to be better anyway. But it was a fun challenge.

 

Did the original tool ever turn up?

[sparkdrummer]

I'm still looking through my pile of disks (BIG pile) and the only screen dump I've found so far was the one put out by Qualitysoft. As far as I can tell (and remember) it dumps the screen to the printer.

[Omega-TI]

Hi Tursi,

I'll have to catch the video after work, since I have to leave in about 15 minutes. I was able to get the first two captures to display properly, but I had some issues with 3 & 4 displaying properly that I'll try to work out later this evening or after I view your video.

 

I noticed you suspended your wish list until you get back, so I'll just do the 'normal thing', of course that will have to wait until I get back this evening as well.

 

THANKS!

[Omega-TI]

I've finished the first draft of the viewer tool, and it all appears to be working, so I've counted it as a release.

 

Just got home, first thing I did was watch the video. Excellent! I'm going to enjoy having this as an option. There are just so many many cool new things for the TI lately, some I'm not even allowed to talk about.... yet!

 

The next thing I'm going to try is to see if I can load this via a batch file from within 4A/DOS.

 

Thanks again Tursi!

[Omega-TI]

Tursi,

I've been giving some thought to future upgrades and modifications of existing programs. I was wondering... when the new SAMS card is released, could that extra memory area be exploited as a place to stick the load interrupt entry point for the screen capture utility? I'm thinking there would be many places where it would not be interfered with by most programs not designed to use it.

[Tursi]

No.. the LOAD interrupt can be triggered at any time, so it can't live in bank switched memory (or every page needs the interrupt vector and handler to be available). With SAMS active right now, if the top bank of memory is paged, pressing LOAD will likely crash the system.

 

Basically, the way it works is pressing the LOAD interrupt causes the CPU to unconditionally read the address and workspace from >FFFC to >FFFF (ie: the top 4 bytes of CPU memory space), and then jump to the address stored there. If that vector is paged out, or the code it is told to jump to is paged out, you crash.

 

There are ways around the crash, but there's no way around the need to take up at least a few bytes of actual memory in the currently active space.

[Omega-TI]

Thank's Tursi, now that it's been explained, it makes perfect sense.